


ships that drank the sea

by grumkin_snark



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-19
Updated: 2017-11-19
Packaged: 2019-02-04 12:56:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,567
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12771540
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grumkin_snark/pseuds/grumkin_snark
Summary: They don't expect to seehimin Rhaenys, and so they don't.





	ships that drank the sea

**Author's Note:**

> Complete self-indulgence.

Rhaenys rises with the sun. It’s something Elia’s never been able to do herself, but even as a babe her daughter always preferred to wake at dawn rather than a more palatable hour. There had been wet nurses offering to take care of her to let Elia rest, but she wasn’t about to let some stranger nurse her child, rock her, care for her, she  _would not_.

Though at least as a baby, Rhaenys could do little more than wail for attention. Now, she can escape from her room and run into Elia’s, then leap onto the bed with the energy only a five-year-old can harness. These days Elia expects to be awakened rudely, but it’s never gotten any less unpleasant. Especially when it’s accompanied by the damn  _cat_  who always seems to blame  _her_  for his mistress’s overexcitement. She has the claw marks to prove it, too.

“Darling, why don’t you go find your father? Or Grandmother?”

She’d been having a nice dream. It’s dwindled into nothing already, as dreams are wont to do; all she can remember is a voice, and a touch full of naught but desire.

“I want  _you_ , Mama,” Rhaenys complains. “And I’m hungry.”

Elia sighs. She may as well concede to her daughter’s wishes. The dream is long gone now. “All right,” she says at last. “I’m coming.”

Rhaenys pulls her from the bed, her chatter all running together as Elia tries to fully rouse herself and put on something decently presentable. Breakfast is laid out in full on the dining table by the time they arrive, Rhaegar appearing just as groggy as she—it seems she was not the only one Rhaenys had pounced on—and Rhaella just the opposite. Her good-mother been like that ever since Aerys perished two years back: happy to greet the morning, her skin free of bruises, her frame no longer fragile as a bird’s. She smiles often and much, and Rhaenys runs into her waiting arms.

The food is appetizing—she wishes it weren’t. Her first indication that she was pregnant with Rhaenys was her inability to so much as see bacon without wanting to heave. She’s experienced that only twice since, and both had ended up as blood on her sheets. She knows the lords have been hinting to Rhaegar to set her aside for someone more  _fertile_ , as though she’s doing this on purpose, someone able to give him a male heir of his body.

Or…well.  _Any_  child of his body. Not that anyone knows there’s a distinction. None except her. No one expects to see  _him_  in Rhaenys, and so they don’t.

She’s yanked out of her daydream by something Rhaegar says, her fork halfway to her mouth. “What did you say?”

“I said Arthur returns today,” he repeats, seemingly not noticing the way her face goes white. “The Brotherhood is no more, as are the Essosi sellswords they’d brought to their side. And it’s about time, too. You’ve been missing your uncle, haven’t you, my sweet?”

Rhaenys is a rush of exclamations, most of them unintelligible, but all Elia can do is choke down her water and try to keep her composure. Four years he’s been gone. Four years of trying to forget he is very much  _not_  Rhaenys’s uncle, honorary or otherwise. Four years of half-hoping he’d be killed in his efforts so it would make everything easier, and then feeling so sick she couldn’t breathe at the prospect of losing him for good.

“Elia, are you all right?”

Rhaella’s tone is one of concern; the sharpness of her stare is not. She knows, then. Elia had surmised as much long ago, the way she would frown when Rhaenys would say something a certain way or grin just-so, the way she knows the color of her eyes did not come from Rhaegar like everyone else believes. But she’d never brought it up, to Elia or to anyone else, perhaps clinging to the illusion that if the truth were never spoken, the resemblance could be written off as coincidence and nothing more.

Elia manages to school her voice into something like normalcy. “Yes, I…I am simply overcome by the news. It will be good to have him home.”

She very much would like to feign illness in order to not greet him at the gates, but knows she could not get away with it this time, not when she had shown herself to be perfectly healthy mere hours ago. Arthur rides in with a weary group of soldiers at his back, but Elia is struck by how much he  _hasn’t_  changed. There is a scar that cuts through his brow that hadn’t been there before and another across his cheek—no doubt he has more hidden beneath his armor—but his smile when he hugs Rhaegar is the same, the way he bows to her without moving his eyes from hers is the same, the way he glances just a bit too long at Rhaenys is the same. She feels as though she’s been thrust back four years ago; no, thrust back into her girlhood when they’d had no cares in the world except avoiding servants as they kissed feverishly in the closest alcove they could find.

But they’re not careless youths anymore, and remembering their past will do only harm.

* * *

She skillfully avoids him for a full week before he seeks her out. It is under a guise, to be sure, an insistence that he accompany her and Rhaenys for a walk through the godswood for protection and to catch up. Rhaenys’s affinity for the foreboding forest baffles him as much as it had everyone else, but Rhaegar had just laughed and said it must be the blood of the First Men in her, the blood of the Blackwoods.

 _Not Blackwood_ , Elia had thought.  _Dayne._

They walk silently for an hour, watching Rhaenys kick fallen leaves about and occasionally peer up at the brown bark of the trees that should be white or imitate the caw of a roosting raven. But the silence builds until it’s stifling, until Elia can take it no more.

“Why are you here?” She can’t bring herself to look at him; if she does, she’s lost. “You shouldn’t have come.”

Quiet falls again for several minutes as he thinks of what to say. In the end, he chooses not to answer her at all. “She’s grown.”

“Yes, that is what happens as a child gets older.”

“She looks like you.”

“No she doesn’t,” she says with a caustic laugh. “She looks like  _you_. Thank the gods everyone’s too bloody blind to see it.”

She does turn to him now. Half of her wants to slap him. The other half wants to kiss him until the pain of the last four years fades away. “Every day I thought of you both,” he says. “Every damn day I thought I might never see you again.”

“Don’t do this,” she snaps. “She’s not your daughter, Arthur. She can never be your daughter.”

There’s a mutinous look in his dark eyes, eerily similar to the one Oberyn so often has. The one of a man who would do just about anything, never mind the consequences. But it lasts only a moment before it vanishes and he looks away from her and instead to Rhaenys, who obliviously, happily, plays in a pile of red leaves.

“She’ll always be mine.” There’s conviction in his words, but…desolation, too. Anguish. “She’ll always be  _ours_.”

_Yes, she will._

As much as Rhaegar loves Rhaenys—and she knows he does, more than anything—from the very beginning there’s been a part of her that’s felt a sense of wrongness with it all. The guilt is oppressing,  _consuming_ —she knows it’s unfair and reprehensible to think such things. She’s  _not_  his, not by blood, nor could he ever discover it.

More than once she’s wondered if she could tell him, if his love for Rhaenys would supersede her sin, but it’s a risk she cannot take. Not when it could spell Rhaenys’s death, or banishment. Or her  _own_. Even a slim chance of being separated from her daughter is too much to bear. She would square her fate with the gods one day, she’s sure of that, but this is a secret she will take to her grave.

“Do you ever think about it?” he asks. “If things were different?”

“They’re not.”

“If they  _were_.”

A vise slowly tightens around her chest, grabs hold of her heart. “Of course I think about it,” she whispers. “But it doesn’t matter, Arthur. It does no good to imagine what may or may not have been. Things are what they are now, and there’s no changing them. Why must you make it worse?”

“You know why.”

He’s close— _too_  close, were anyone to pass by—and four years’ worth of missing him, of  _worrying_  for him, is suddenly too much. She pulls him behind a tree and crushes her mouth to his, the sensation as familiar as it is illicit; it brings to mind the memories she’d tried so hard to bury, his bare skin against hers, the desperation, the  _want_. The look on his face as he held Rhaenys in his arms.

“I can’t love you,” she says against his lips, so quietly not even a mighty weirwood could hear, “and I always will.”


End file.
